It's the dream of alchemical engineering in microcosm: what if you could create anything? With the barest of reagents, could you recreate the chart of alchemical primes? It's enough to make one think any problem could be solved with alchemy...

This machine's dual Glyphs of Projection allow the machine to select which reagent repopulations the hexarm, depending on which one is used: lead or quicksilver. A hexarm filled with lead can perform fewer projections, because the lead blocks quicksilver form refilling it. Thus with a bit of off-by-one fiddling, I arrange it such that the template atom absorbs enough quicksilver to allow fresh lead to project into replicas of the template atom; over-projection is prevented by the blocking lead.

A straightforward Glyph of Duplication allows cardinals to output as themselves. If the template atom is not a cardinal, the salt supply is unmodified, so the Glyph of Animismus accepts the salt. The vitae and mors have to be disposed of for safety reasons, but are also passed over a bonder and debonder to select between metal or cardinal. If the template is a metal, vitae and mors are disposed; if the template is a cardinal, gold is disposed.

This machine uses a ghost grab on Arm 3: one-time actions at the beginning of a tape loop are prevented from happening a second time by a useless-looking grab at the end of it, the one-time-action cannot close the gripper to swipe another atom because it is already closed. This is how the template atom is passed to the right projector without passing any other atoms. There is also at least one miracle of timing and geometry. Arm 3's instruction tape is full, and Arm 6's swing of valid metal into the top hexarm passes through the eye of an animismus needle. Arm 4 grabs one cycle early before turning to prevent an unwanted regrab, the template atom's input is permanently suppressed, an early silver atom is always disposed because animismus is never ready by then anyway, and so on and so on. I used my entire bag of tricks to save that last arm.

Much of this has already been covered by now, but I believe this is the finest and most parsimonious example of how to create an Everything Machine.

Well, almost the finest. You can present biggie's machine now.

- Alchemist Kazyan